This course provides an overview of strategies that make up a 'smart city' and 'intelligent community' — approaches to local development that integrate digital infrastructure and information and communication technologies with urban planning processes. Students will study the importance of governance forms, human capital, and equity considerations that are integral to their success. Additional key aspects include analyzing real-time data to better manage resources and congestion, forming partnerships between government, industry and universities to promote digital innovation and economic growth, and strengthening access to broadband technologies to improve the quality of life and public engagement of citizens.

This course examines Canadian local public finance in comparative perspective — where revenue comes from and how it is spent — and discusses the implications of municipal finance for urban public policy, planning, and the provision of municipal services. The first half of the course provides a comprehensive introduction to major concepts in local public finance for students interested in urban politics, public policy, and urban development, as well as the politics of municipal budgeting and intergovernmental fiscal relations. The second half of the course builds on the first by focusing on how public finance influences the shape of urban and suburban development.

All students in the program will complete a capstone course in their second year that will draw upon the academic background and training provided in both their core and elective courses, as well as the practical experience gained through their summer internship to analyze a key problem or challenge in economic development and provide both the analytical and governance components of an integrated solution to the problem. The class will be divided into groups of two or three students and each group will work on the project under the supervision of faculty mentor(s). The focus of the projects will be on demonstrating integration, application, and innovation skills to address challenges in managing the process of urban development.

All students in the program will complete a capstone course in their second year that will draw upon the academic background and training provided in both their core and elective courses, as well as the practical experience gained through their summer internship to analyze a key problem or challenge in economic development and provide both the analytical and governance components of an integrated solution to the problem. The class will be divided into groups of two or three students and each group will work on the project under the supervision of faculty mentor(s). The focus of the projects will be on demonstrating integration, application, and innovation skills to address challenges in managing the process of urban development.

This foundation course explores perspectives on what constitutes academic and scholarly sources, improves critical thinking skills, and advances each students' research abilities in preparation for their disciplinary studies. Together we achieve this by exploring the social and political factors related to information creation, dissemination, and organization; what constitutes authority; and how these factors influence the types of data we find when conducting academic research.

In this course we debate the theory and method of fieldwork itself, exploring ways in which ethnomusicologists operate in "the field" as they construct their musical ethnographies. The course will involve students in practical fieldwork studies of their own. Amongst other things we will also explore technology, documentation techniques, issues of reflexivity and collaboration, ethics, and a range of ways to present our fieldwork experiences and findings.

This graduate seminar examines forms and methodologies of public-facing musicological work. We consider the methods and objectives of "applied" disciplines; recent community-engaged projects and their outcomes; musicological work that seeks to affect public policy; and musicological knowledge written/produced for popular audiences. Students will practice public-facing research and writing, and will engage with musicologists working and teaching outside the academy.

This graduate seminar examines recent and historical approaches to publicly engaged music scholarship, broadly defined as intellectual and creative activities for and with communities beyond the academy. Course topics include: music scholarship and the changing media landscape, music research and social responsibility, collaborative methodologies, "applied" research and community engagement, and historical perspectives on "the listener." Students will read and respond to literature on public scholarship, review and critique examples of public scholarship produced for popular audiences, and consider the methods and outcomes of community-engaged and policy-oriented work. Students will practice public-facing writing and will work collaboratively to develop original content with public engagement in mind. Students will expand their understanding of the role and potential of public music scholarship, and will engage with music scholars working outside the academy.

Plainchant and polyphony, including topics for individual research.

Long central to European culture, ballet has in the last two decades become a vibrant and expanding area of academic research. This seminar will focus on what is arguably the most influential ballet company of all times, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Between 1909 and 1929, Diaghilev brought together many of the era's greatest modern artists — among them composers Stravinsky, Poulenc, Debussy, Ravel, Satie, de Falla, Prokofiev, and Strauss; choreographers Fokine, Nijinsky, Nijinska, and Balanchine; and artists and writers Bakst, Picasso, Matisse, Goncharova, and Cocteau — to produce such ground-breaking ballets as Jeux, Daphnis et Chloé, Firebird, and The Rite of Spring. Drawing on the vast multidisciplinary literature about the Ballets Russes and their world, we will examine seminal works, their reception, and their relationship to French culture and cultural politics. Topics will include music, choreography, and staging, as well as nationalism, exoticism, gender/sexuality, and cultural hierarchies, whether in the works themselves, in Ballets Russes historiography, or in past and present-day performance practices.

How does group music making lend itself to communal feeling? How have dance movements contributed to social movements? And what of music and dance’s perceived powers to fracture social groups as well as to cause them to cohere? This course explores discourses, practices, and experiences of power and politics in performances of music and dance. We draw on contemporary interdisciplinary literature related to individual and group performances, considering topics such as the relative "agency" of musical improvisers, the widely reported experiences of collectivity in social dance, and national cultural policies that attempt to shape relations between performance and politics. The course prepares students for focused ethnographic case studies in the second half of the class by providing a theoretical introduction to concepts of "performance" and "power" in the humanities and humanistic social sciences in the course's opening weeks.

This seminar is an inquiry into how music functions as a political force both historically and in contemporary society. It will introduce students to the various historical and contemporary uses of music to both reflect and shape various political ideologies, agendas, and positions. Issues will include the role of music in activism and resistance, music and censorship, the politics of music technology, and the role of music in shaping and reflecting various political communities and identities. The course will draw on readings and theories from the fields of political science, classical studies, anthropology, cultural and literary theory, gender studies, philosophy and aesthetics. Examples from Western and Non-Western and popular and classical traditions will be used as case studies. Theoretical and interpretive approaches to be introduced and discussed include deconstruction, narrative and reception theory, performativity, Marxist critique, and various aspects of post-colonial theory.

The course will appraise the rationale for and relevance of music history courses in diverse settings, including private instruction; conservatory classes; community lectures and courses; and university classes, from undergraduate music appreciation courses for non-music students to graduate courses. General pedagogical issues will be studied, such as the writing across the curriculum movement, peer learning, and the use of educational technology. Teaching techniques and strategies pertinent to specific types of music courses (e.g., survey courses or Canadian music courses) will be explored. Some attention will also be given to a survey of earlier philosophies about the teaching of music history.

Music making is an embodied, cultural practice, but as recently as 2001, music scholars such as Philip Bohlman and Ronald Radano levied critiques about music scholarship's lack of attention to issues of race. Building on Radano and Bohlman's important volume, Music and the Racial Imagination, this seminar will survey key scholarship that takes up questions of race and ethnicity in music making. In addition to reading key writings on the subject by music scholars such as Guthrie Ramsey, Samuel Floyd, and Deborah Wong, we will also read work by cultural theorists such as Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, George Lipsitz, Ronald Takaki, etc. who have written about race and ethnicity from a number of perspectives including literary criticism, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and ethnic studies.

Remix Music, from Analogue to Digital explores the emergence of music remixes and their historical context and cultural implications, both within and beyond Western culture. By examining the aesthetics and political economies of remixing, the course builds on theoretical interventions that complicate the creation, reception, and commodification of music.

This seminar addresses the linked concepts of musical genre and repertoire variation. How do musical genres form, and how are they maintained? What analytical tools can we use to study the creation, reception, and circulation of variants? What do variants tell us about generic norms and the negotiation of generic boundaries?

This seminar will cover three broad areas of scholarship: genre theory; the study of variants in musicology and ethnomusicology, with an emphasis on computational approaches; and sociological approaches to networks and the diffusion of innovations. Evaluation will be based on a final paper and in-class presentation, occasional short assignments, and contributions to class discussions. For the final paper, students are encouraged to apply the theoretical and practical approaches explored in this seminar to their own areas of study.

This seminar will explore the earliest known accounts of indigenous music in Canada and environs. The body of evidence for this neglected topic comes in the form of travel accounts by European explorers, from Jacques Cartier to Martin Frobisher. The seminar will focus on descriptions and depictions of dance music. Beyond Canada, a good number of musical accounts exist for the Caribbean, Brazil, and parts of what is now the United States. The sum total of pertinent writings covers nearly every major European language, ranging chronologically from Fernández de Oviedo’s 1534 Historia general to Theodor de Bry's monumental America (1590–98). Other considerations will include the impact of 1) medieval travel literature, such as Prester John’s Travels, and 2) emerging European dance literature, both treatises and printed music, on sixteenth-century accounts of music in the New World.

Popular music functions as a sacred text for many in the world today. For some it is an adjunct to participating in organized religion and for others an alternative to such participation, providing moments of transcendence outside traditional "religious" channels. Drawing on examples from both Western and Non-Western case studies this course will examine various critical approaches to and discourses surrounding popular music and spirituality (including aspects of ritual and religion and manifestations of techno-spirituality), virtuality, immateriality, and the ineffable. We will address questions dealing with the metaphysics of music and sound in regards to changing technologically driven concepts of identity, community, and location as well as increasing manifestations of religious and spiritual content in recent mainstream pop and hip hop. The course will draw from readings by noted poststructuralist scholars in aesthetics, philosophy, sound studies, sociology, and media studies including Theodore Adorno, Philip Auslander, Jean Baudrillard, Erik Davis, Stuart Hall, Katherine Hayles, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Henry Jenkins, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Bruno Latour, Gerald Raunig, and Bernard Steigler among others.

This course examines the ethical and practical considerations of working with audiovisual archives. We consider the changing role of archives in music research, with a focus on repatriation projects and proactive archiving techniques by which scholars engage with communities to animate archival materials in support of local cultural activities. Students will gain practical skills in community-engaged archiving, such as digitizing and cataloguing analogue recordings, and will collaborate with community partners on archive-based public-facing events. Students will be expected to participate in certain activities outside of class time.

The relationship between musical practice and capital (both economic and cultural) is often an uneasy one. Art has been idealized by many as separate from commerce and concerns about how economic interest and commodification stifles creativity and lulls listeners into passivity loom large in scholarly and popular discourse about music. On the other hand, expressive culture such as music commonly serves as a marker of socio-economic class and numerous artists strive to turn their creativity into the basis of their economic survival. And the tensions surrounding the varied perspectives on music and capital commonly play central roles in shaping musical sounds and their meanings.

This course draws on the writing of foundational cultural theorists such as Marx, Adorno, and Bourdieu as well as a number of musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and music-focused sociologists (e.g., Katherine Preston, Stephen Cottrell, and Keith Negus) in order to explore how questions of financial reward, industry, art for art’s sake, patronage, hereditary professionalism, etc. have informed music making and research on musical practices in popular, folk, and art music contexts both past and present. We will also explore new research on social capital in relation to networks of music makers, consumers, and cultural interm ediaries.

Aural architecture and noise pollution. Talking rivers and screaming microbes. Underwater listening, sound walking, and hearing heat. Bird song, bug rhythm, and cross-species composition. This course examines how humans and other organisms use sound to express, construct, conserve, and harm the environment. We will engage with scholarship across disciplines — including work in ecomusicology, soundscape ecology, sensory ethnography, and bioacoustics — as well as with electroacoustic composition, sonic art, and everyday sound-based practices. We will also consider pressing issues for the humanistic study of the environment, and reflect on the value and ethics of an acoustic approach. This course is open to students with any disciplinary background. Proficiency in music is not required.

Aural architecture and noise pollution. Talking rivers and screaming microbes. Underwater listening, sound walking, and hearing heat. Bird song, bug rhythm, and cross-species composition. This course examines how humans and other organisms use sound to express, construct, conserve, and harm the environment. We will engage with scholarship across disciplines — including work in ecomusicology, soundscape ecology, sensory ethnography, and bioacoustics — as well as with electroacoustic composition, sonic art, and everyday sound-based practices. We will also consider pressing issues for the humanistic study of the environment, and reflect on the value and ethics of an acoustic approach. This course is open to students with any disciplinary background. Proficiency in music is not required.

This seminar explores the many musical interpretations of the Middle Ages during the Romantic period. The best known pieces are large stage works, from A.-E.-M. Grétry’s Aucassin et Nicolette (1779) to R. Wagner's last opera Parsifal (1882). Other repertoires include a significant corpus of medieval-themed songs. Participants will investigate the various ways in which composers and other Romantic musicians evoke the Middle Ages, and the enduring impact of their efforts. Neo-Romantic 'medieval' music includes folk songs edited by M. Barbeau and the music of early films like The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).

This seminar explores the manifold meanings and practices of "voice" from ethnomusicological and anthropological perspectives. We consider how different voices have been created and evolved over time — polite, urbane, mature, feminine, masculine, modern, ethnonational voices, country voices, and so on — under the influence of listeners, technology, political economy, and the environment. How do relations between voice and identity vary across cultures? How do people strategically transformation their voices over time and in everyday life, and to what ends? We investigate the different voices that individuals employ in the course of life — markedly different singing and speaking voices, voices of authority and obsequiousness, voices that announce, childlike voices, voices that speak to children, racialized, gendered, classed voices. We survey ethnographic, historical, and analytical approaches to the voice.

In this seminar we inquire into the myriad sonic and musical processes and activities through which people appropriate cultural materials and practices and are socialized in their seemingly mundane daily lives and interactions with mass culture. Drawing on recent work in sound studies and practice theory, as well as on the history, ethnography, and philosophy of sound and music, we consider a number of related issues: 1) processes of appropriation and personalization of mass cultural objects and technologies; 2) personal uses of music and sound in everyday life, in the pursuit of social functionality, relationships, identity, and so on; 3) strategic deployments of the flexible relations between music, language, sound, and silence 4) practices of listening; 5) the way that experience, ideology, and action are conditioned by sonic environments; and 6) the way that these strategic deployments of sound and music necessarily participate in state and mass cultural uses of sound, music, and acoustic design for control and socialization. We consider historical and contemporary case studies in the Middle East, Europe, East Asia, North America, and elsewhere.

This course will explore musicological approaches to the study of music in cinema by looking at the films of arguably the most famous director of the twentieth century, Alfred Hitchcock. In a career spanning half a century, Hitchcock's output of some sixty films ranged from the silent era to the advent of Dolby Sound, with composers spanning several generations of greats, from Franz Waxman to John Williams. Hitchcock’s approach to music varies widely, from its centrality to the plot of Waltzes from Vienna (1933) to its conspicuous absence in The Birds (1963), and from non- diegetic orchestral cues in nearly every film after 1930 to key diegetic uses as heard in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). Using these films as a starting point, the seminar will explore theoretical approaches to film music, in particular the seminal work of Michel Chion.

Across a range of music genres, Black artists and their lived realities continually shape, inform, and influence the many ways in which musics are produced, experienced, and consumed. In this course we examine how innovation, improvisation, and the impact of racialization become key features in various genres such as dub, the blues, steelpan, ska, afrobeat, and hip-hop.

This course looks at the mature works of Richard Wagner and Giacomo Puccini in the contexts of (1) their own internal geographies and implicit global ideologies, (2) the operas' immediate reception, with particular focus on early performances in North and South America, Africa, India, and East Asia. We will consider how burgeoning technologies of rapid long-distance transit such as the train and ocean liner made possible a new kind of mobile operatic practice, with exchange of singers, staging materials, and scores around the world. Students will develop a critical analytical vocabulary that allows them to participate in ongoing interdisciplinary conversations about the global and (post-)colonial world, in ways that are strengthened and amplified by close engagement with the operatic text and its staging. Weekly topics include musical representations of the earth and deep historical time, indigeneity, nationhood, global pitch standardization, and colonial relationships. The syllabus features readings by Sloterdijk, Walton, Aspden, Liao, Gallimore, Hesselager, and Roos.

In this course we examine the role of the DJ in shaping and reshaping popular musics, the recording industry and concerns around composition, musical shape, and live performance. Moving across a number of genres, from disco to reggae, house to hip-hop, jungle, and electric pow-wow. The course examines the nuances and intricacies the DJ has brought to the consumption and enjoyment of youth-driven popular music. By taking a cross-genre, global trajectory, the course centres the DJ (and their positionality) as a way to open up the possibilities of examining music as it sits at the intersection of technology, live audiences, and industry while being attentive to race and gender identities.